6 Wound Care Market Trends for 2026 and Beyond

Wound care, like every other specialty, is always changing and evolving. Growth and change are critical in continuing to find a way to improve patient care and understand the biological processes that drive wound care. But in order to apply those breakthroughs, there needs to be a need or a gap in the market that these wound care innovations can fill. Unlike every other specialty, though, wound care is undergoing a number of big shifts at once.

We’ll look into seven changing wound care trends, where the market stands, and how all of this will impact you.

1. AI is making an impact—but not everywhere

Artificial intelligence (AI) is not new to wound care, which means the specialty has a bit of a leg up on other areas in healthcare. Tissue Analytics isn’t the only machine learning application in wound care; even wound dressings can feature AI now. And while it’s transforming the tools available to wound care professionals, adoption has not been as widespread.

A recent Net Health and Becker’s Healthcare report showed that leaders across various care settings have a number of major areas of concern. Specific concerns about compliance remain a major area of uncertainty. Compliance also relies on secure data transfer, which is not yet necessarily reliable or even possible in all AI tools. Regardless of the tools practitioners are using, HIPAA regulations still need to be followed. Reliability at large is another major uncertainty for leaders. If clinicians can’t trust the tools they use, they’re not worth integrating.

Bigger concerns, however, include the ability for systems to talk to each other and effectively share data, the ever-present cost and ROI pressure, and, the most commonly-cited concern, staff adoption and training. 90% of survey respondents listed staff adoption as a top-three concern for their organization. It might be easy to think this means that wound care staff just needs more training on the tools, but it’s important to take a closer look at each individual system or clinic and determine whether or not the tools are in fact working well in the staff workflows and if they’re having a positive impact.

2. Home health regulations are changing

Wound care and home health are approaching an intersection. Wound care as a whole is expected to grow to a $10.4 billion value by 2033, with key regional increases and a demand for advanced wound care driving the growth. Home health is also expected to grow 6% from 2025 to 2033. These two areas are not inherently the same thing, but the overlap is great. Think about cases like rural populations, the elderly, disabled people, and those who don’t have easy access to transportation.

Medicare has been a major reimbursement source for home health providers historically, but the reimbursement model is changing. Until this year, Medicare reimbursed home health providers per visit; now, they’re reimbursing a flat rate for every 30-day period of care. Those flat rates are then adjusted based on a number of factors, like clinical group, timing in the care sequence, functional impairment, comorbidities, and more.

With different reimbursement models, home health agencies will be changing the way they do business and, with that, providing more consistent care (through the entire payment period, rather than terminating early from a per-visit perspective) and focusing more on accuracy rather than volume.

3. New CTP regulations are changing how clinicians code

Wound care documentation is always changing as Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services regulations are changing—just look at home health. In the case of cellular- and tissue-based products (CTPs), more rigorous requirements have been added. In the past, CTPs could be reimbursed with any usage within wound care.

With the new 2026 updates, the focus is now on proving medical necessity. Practices will need to show that they made every effort to use standard-of-care (SOC) before moving on to the more advanced options, like CTPs. This all comes out of the recent movement towards value-based care models and away from fee-for-service. CMS and other insurance providers are more concerned about patient outcomes than the volume of care provided, meaning practices will get reimbursed for better patient results instead of based on specific services provided.

4. Skin substitute markets are shrinking

Documentation and compliance updates aren’t the only things changing the market in CTPs. The new regulations are making it more difficult for CTP, also known as skin substitutes, companies to succeed in the wound care market. Other research and development may be slowing as well. The focus on SOC is putting pressure on more advanced wound care options and changing how providers are treating wounds like diabetic foot ulcers and venous leg ulcers.

With the changing regulations, not only is the focus on SOC before advanced wound care tactics, but skin substitutes themselves are also being reimbursed differently. In past years, skin substitutes would be reimbursed based on the value of the product as a specific “biologic”; the new regulations mean skin substitutes are now reimbursed as an “incident-to” supply instead of their own category.

All in all, between the changing reimbursement rates and the stricter compliance expectations for the usage of CTPs in wound care, there’s far less incentive to use skin substitutes in 2026 and beyond.

5. Pay attention to quality measures

As we mentioned earlier, regulatory changes are aligning closer to a value-based care structure that’s focused on patient care quality and better outcomes, rewarding providers who are focused on the quality of their practice’s outcomes. This isn’t just limited to wound care—healthcare trends as a whole are shifting towards a value-based model.

In the case of wound care, that means clinical quality measures (CQM) and electronic clinical quality measures (eCQM). eCQMs are derived from data within EHRs to determine patient care based on several factors—think: patient engagement, patient safety, care coordination, use of resources, and effectiveness of care. These measures can then be used to ensure providers and practices are meeting regulatory guidelines.

Just keep in mind that eCQMs might not be as easy to track and report as we wish they were. One study found that larger practices, cooperatives, and systems often used a hybrid approach, rather than an EHR alone, to track and report eCQM data. This mix-and-match tactic is not always available to small- to medium-sized practices with fewer software tools and less staff time to dedicate to the task. It’s important to plan ahead as much as possible for practices that have fewer resources available to them.

6. Interoperability needs to be built in, not tacked on

Another key element in, really, all of the above trends is interoperability. That means the ability of different systems, usually EHRs, to talk to each other and share data quickly and effectively. We’ve all experienced the strain as a patient, when you have to list your medical history with every new provider, and most of us have experienced this as providers as well, struggling to get patient data from a previous provider. In the era of eCQMs, AI, home health, and increased regulatory speculation, it’s crucial to be able to access all the information possible about a certain patient.

In wound care especially, referral leakage is a concern. This happens in wound care, often more than other specialties, because wounds are often treated as an acute problem, in an emergency department or an urgent care center. They’re then often seen for a routine follow up with a general practitioner or seen by another clinician if complications materialize. That means that the history of the treatment of the wound may not be available for the treating clinician if the EHRs at the various clinics the patient has been seen at are not interoperable.

Interoperability is key in driving reimbursement through value-based payment models by ensuring proper wound care is administered based on the history of the patient and the wound, which means interoperability should be built into your EHR, not tacked on or patched together.

What do these trends mean for providers?

Providers should be paying attention to your technology, whether it operates within the workflow you need, whether it meets compliance requirements, and whether it can sufficiently interact with other software tools, EHR or otherwise. All of this is serving the biggest shift in wound care (and really healthcare overall): value-based care and patient outcomes-focused reimbursement and payment models.

Preparing for the future of wound care market trends

Wound care market trends are always changing; that’s the nature of healthcare as things develop and new treatment options are becoming available. Preparing for the future is more about understanding your own practice than predicting how new technology and tools will function. Knowing how your practice’s workflow operates, knowing what your staff needs to perform their functions, and staying up to date on the latest treatment approaches and breakthroughs are the best things you can understand in order to prepare for the future.

If you’re sure of your own clinic’s needs, adapting to changing regulations, tools, and technology becomes about fitting those changes into your workflow, not the other way around.

FAQ: Wound care market trends in 2026